The NPR Politics Podcast - Midterm Update: First Black Woman Nominated For Governor & Other Tuesday Primaries Takeaways

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

It was a big night Tuesday for Democratic women again, from Georgia to Kentucky to Texas. It was also a big night for change on the Democratic side, even if the fight between progressives and the establishment fizzled. Plus, Republicans see more signs for positive results in November. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Asma Khalid, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Aaliyah in Atlanta, Georgia with my dad, Laurent. Hi. I'm 18 and I just voted in my first elections. This podcast was recorded at 1020 a.m. on Wednesday, May 23rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org, the NPR One app, and your local public radio station like WABE for us. All right, here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with takeaways from that primary in Georgia, as well as voting in Texas and Kentucky. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. All right. Another Wednesday, another day of us figuring out what we have learned, what we haven't learned and what we want to ask about for the next round of primaries. So, Asma, let's start with Georgia, because you went and you covered the Stacey versus Stacey. And I got to say, I was surprised at how large the margin of victory was for Stacey Abrams over Stacey Evans. Yeah. I mean, in the days leading up to the election, polls had showed Stacey Abrams, who's African-American, with a double digit lead. But there were still a lot of voters who

were undecided. You know, Scott, it's interesting. I don't know if I was totally surprised in part, not because of the fact, and we should point out, Stacey Abrams won by a very, very convincing margin. I believe it was about 77 percent of the vote. That is huge. And I admit I was surprised to see it that large. But it spoke to me about two main things. One is sort of the amazing level of organization that was happening by progressive groups and specifically by African-American women. We saw something kind of akin to what

we had seen with Doug Jones in Alabama. So you had groups like Higher Heights for America, Black Pack, and one organizer who described something to me is called Black Women's Spring Break. Just a bunch of black women from around the country who flew down to knock on doors and to make phone calls for Stacey Abrams. And that was all independent of any official Democratic Party umbrella. The other thing that I thought was interesting, and I began to see a little bit of this on the back end of my trip, is the sort of racialization of this campaign. And the degree to which I met undecided voters who are African American, who felt extremely uncomfortable with some of the tone that they felt, even if it was indirect, just some sort

of racial coding that they felt, not necessarily from Stacey Evans, but maybe people around her about the campaign. And that was leaning them to vote for Stacey Abrams. Yeah. Do you mean that they were getting the message from, not directly from Stacey Evans, but from supporters of hers, that Stacey Abrams couldn't win because she was black? I heard that from a supporter directly of Stacey Evans, that there was no way an African-American woman could win today in the state of Georgia. But at the same time, there's been so much active talk from Democratic leaders and also from Democratic activists over the last year of, hey, if we are the party that cares about inclusiveness, who cares

about diversity, we need to not stop running white men all over the place. We need to put up more diverse candidates. And it was one of those stats that, Asma, was in your story that was just crazy to me reading it, which I guess I'd known this before, but just seeing it in print or seeing it online, that if Abrams won, she would only be the third black candidate ever elected governor in American history. And the first black woman. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that's kind of remarkable is last night, just becoming the nominee of a major party, she broke history.

No black woman has ever even been the nominee of a major party for governor. And she's not. She's the minority leader of the statehouse. She was the two-term minority leader. Yeah, she's an absolute, her resume is completely establishment. And what's so interesting about this, when you say you heard from an Evans supporter that she couldn't win today in Georgia, that might be possible. But somebody like her might win in the future if she can't win this year because Georgia is only a little over half white. It used to be two-thirds white. So the percentage of the white vote that a Democratic candidate in Georgia needs to get is going down. You know, we saw Michelle Nunn, who ran for Senate, just couldn't make it,

couldn't get that 31, 32 percent of the white vote that Democrats need. But just like Christian evangelicals form the backbone of the Republican Party, African-Americans, in particular African-American women, form the activist backbone of the Democratic Party. So it's not so surprising that eventually you're going to have actual candidates that reflect the base of the party. In Osmo, we keep hearing that Abrams does have a strategy of boosting black turnout in the fall, getting black voters to show up who might have necessarily sat out previous races. I mean, how does that strategy translate to campaigning from what you could say? Like, what were some of the specific things that the Abrams campaign was doing to get black voters to show up? So they've been focused heavily,

I would say, on rural communities, but also just black and brown and Asian voters writ large. Stacey Abrams actually started this organization a few years ago called the New Georgia Project, which was focused specifically on registering these voters. Her philosophy is that there are just untapped potential, that if you could register these voters, they would likely vote Democratic. Now, no doubt there are some skeptics to that idea, you know, that they don't know that these folks will a register and be that they will show up on Election Day, specifically in a midterm election year. But she spoke about that philosophy again last night. She spoke about the idea that she intends, with the help of her supporters, to register every last person that they all know.

And that's what she's hoping to do before Election Day. You know, I will point out one thing that I found really interesting last night were the overall turnout numbers. So, you know, in 2014, when a Democrat lost the governorship in Georgia, the Democratic candidate lost by about 200,000 votes. Last night, if you look at turnout numbers, round about 50,000 more Republicans voted for governor than Democrat, right? So you had 50,000 more votes on the Republican column and the Republican primary compared to the Democratic column. You know, the interesting thing to me is also what's going to be Stacey Abrams' message in a general election. I mean, she clearly wants to boost black turnout. That's her strategy. But to the extent that her message is about boosting black turnout, you know, she had that very powerful ad where she said,

we have the power to redraw the image of leadership so we can all see ourselves reflected in its face with ourselves reflected underlined. Meaning, you know, time to have black people see black people in power, just ourselves reflected underlined, meaning, you know, time to have black people see black people in power, just like they saw a black president. Time to have that in Georgia. But to me, you know, politics in America is so racialized right now. Donald Trump has decided that's his secret weapon. And I'm wondering, she obviously isn't going to choose the strategy of trying to convert white rural or white working class voters to the Democratic ticket. But what is the message that she's going to send that's an inclusive message where progressive ideas can be appealed to voters across the spectrum? Or is it just going to be a kind of racialized turnout message? Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.

I mean, one thing, as you mentioned, Mara, she was the House minority leader. So she has this track record. And one of the things her Democratic opponent, Stacey Evans, really tried to hit her on during the primary was that she was a compromiser, that she had formed these deals. Oh, that sounds like it probably helped Abrams. Yeah, that she had actually cut deals, you know, around, say, it was redistricting or cutting the number of days for early voting. And Abrams' whole argument was that I had to do these things because if I hadn't sat down at the table to negotiate, Republicans would have come back with a worse deal if we had not been there to negotiate. That's going to be what I'm watching for in the general election, because presenting yourself as someone who's willing to work across the aisle is what worked for Conor Lamb, Ralph Northam, and Doug Jones. Working across the aisle is an answer to the chaos and division of what people

see in Washington now. Lamb won that special election in Pennsylvania earlier this year, and Northam is the governor of Virginia. So if she can have the same kind of message, like Ralph Northam did in Virginia, that she's going to work across the aisle because she has, that could be a message that blunts some of the tribal politics in Georgia. So let's shift gears here and talk about Texas for a minute, because I think there's an interesting contrast here. We talked so much the last few podcasts about how this race in suburban Houston, the seventh congressional district, was the latest battlefield where Democratic leaders said, hey, we want to go with the

candidate who's still liberal but reaches out to independent voters more, a little bit more pragmatic, a little bit more moderate, as opposed to a liberal candidate who's just trying to charge up the progressive base and might alienate more conservative voters. What's interesting to me is in the Georgia race, you had national Democratic leaders flock to Stacey Abrams, who is trying to do this tactic on a statewide level. But in all these congressional races, it's the opposite. The National Party gathered around the moderates. So Mara, Texas 7th, we had talked about Laura Moser, who got basically carpet bombed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before the March

primary, running against Lizzie Fletcher, who's a long time Houston attorney, the person that national leaders wanted to win this race. Fletcher ends up winning pretty easily. So the bottom line is that the lefty candidate didn't win in the seventh congressional district of Texas, making Democrats more hopeful that they can actually pick up that seat. And one of the storylines that has been pushed by Republicans is the Democratic Party is lurching to the left. Too many of these lefty candidates are getting nominated. They're not going to be able to win in the general election. I think that there are some examples of that, but there haven't been enough of them to say that's a big trend because last night didn't play into that template. On the

other hand, you know, Lizzie Fletcher, I mean, she was no moderate kind of Pennsylvania rural white male candidate who had once been a Republican three weeks before. I mean, those are the kind of mainstream candidates. There wasn't much difference substantively between these two women. I'll tell you where the difference was and why it matters, because I was down there last week. I talked to both candidates. Both campaigns were equally annoyed by the storyline because it was

kind of typecasting, like you said, Lizzie Fletcher. Well, it's the Republican storyline. Right. But here's where it was different. I think they did have key differences on some of the areas that Democratic strategists are worried about how they'll play in the fall. And that is health care. Moser was for the Medicare for all Bernie Sanders type single payer system. Fletcher's is more of the traditional Democratic line at the moment, which is a shifting line of what we need to do is boost the ACA. And the other thing is impeachment. Moser said, I would vote for impeachment right now. Fletcher said, I don't like Donald Trump, but I'm a lawyer. We need to let Mueller do his job and then weigh the evidence.

I'd be open to impeachment, but we need to let the facts go first. Right. That is not an argument that a lot of revved up Democratic base voters want to hear right now. So when you were down there, did you get the sense that whatever Democratic nominee came out of this process would have a realistic shot? Because this is, I mean, you've reported one of these 25 districts in the country where Hillary Clinton won, but a Republican was serving. Did you get a sense of that at all from voters about the actual just way that the winds are shifting? Yeah, this is the central casting district for the exact type of battleground that Democrats

think is the path to win back in the majority. Longtime Republican district, George H.W. Bush represented it at one point, but it went for Romney over Obama by a pretty wide margin in 2012. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton beat out Donald Trump. They think that this is the higher education, higher income Republican voters who are just never going to be comfortable with Donald Trump. Whether or not they actually get to the point where they vote Democrat is the big question, but they feel like there's a path there, especially given this was a district that was ravaged by flooding last year with the hurricane. And they feel like they can make that an issue of government inaction, Republican controlled Congress not doing enough. And that as well as the Republican unease presents that

opening. So I think this is going to be a well-funded race. Lizzie Fletcher is going to have a lot of resources to work with here. Another example of where the left-wing progressive candidate didn't win the Democratic nomination was the 23rd Congressional District of Texas. This is a district that Clinton won by three points. It's being represented right now by Will Hurd, an African-American Republican. So Democrats are very hopeful they can take the seat over. And Gina Ortiz-Jones, who is a former Air Force intelligence officer, won. She beat Rick Trevino, San Antonio high school teacher and a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic convention in 2016. So another example where the Democratic establishment got the candidate that they wanted.

That San Antonio district, another race that's a lot more of a reach for Democrats, but they put it on their list, is a district north of Austin. Their candidate there, another woman, another military veteran. But Asma, candidate after candidate after candidate, this morning, over the last few weeks, it's women and it's women who are running for the first time and have compelling storylines. I mean, this seems to be an obvious hit you over the head trend of Democrats this year. It does. And I don't know that it's a huge surprise. Right. Just given that the day after Donald Trump's inauguration was the Women's March and we saw this huge upsurge of activism among women. Again, though, I would say I think it's really important to sort of see how this plays out regionally in different states, because

I think so much of this activism we've seen on a national level. And I really don't think it can be overstated that there are places like Georgia where about 70 percent of white women voted Republican in the last midterm year. And I think we'll have to see if there are actual shifts in this. And let's talk about the Republicans side for a minute on that note. I think most of the most of the actual races worth pointing out are on the Democratic side because that's often the case with the out of power party. But last night, President Trump was speaking in Washington and he had one of his started on script, veered off script moments that that was was a joke, but also underscored a lot of the anxieties that that Republicans have about this year.

So your vote in 2018 is every bit as important as your vote in 2016. Although I'm not sure I really believe that, but you know. I don't know who the hell wrote that line. I'm not sure. Mara, your 2016 vote. He's the stand-up comic in chief. He meant it as a joke. He was even pointing fun at himself because he's the most important person to himself. But this is a metaphor for Republican worries about Donald Trump not sticking on script. Republicans want the president to talk about the economy, the economy, the economy, and tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. And they don't want him veering off script, but they also know that they can't do anything about it. But I think the question, Asma, like you were saying before, if Democrats are energized to show up and vote and you have a certain chunk of Trump voters, people who are motivated by Trump himself, who say, yeah, I'll be there in 2020.

I'm going to sit this one out. That's the type of environment that can that can make up for some of those lukewarm Republicans still showing up to vote. Yeah. Though I should say this morning I got an email from Donald Trump's re-election campaign that they've hired on Chris Carr specifically to engage in 2018 midterm election outreach, right? So that's kind of an interesting move. I mean, Chris Carr was the RNC's political director. Is that right, Mara? Yes. And you know, what's interesting about that is there's no doubt that the RNC and the White House political operation is taking this race very seriously. They say that every Republican should be running as if their political lives depend on it. They say the president understands that, that he'll be out in red states at these big rallies

and he'll be raising tremendous amounts of money. He was at that dinner last night. So the question is, can the president transfer the popularity that he has with the Republican base to Republican candidates, even if he's not on the ballot? And in the first round of special elections, we saw that Republican turnout maybe was a little off, or at least Democratic turnout was much more. When you saw measures of enthusiasm, Democrats seemed much more enthusiastic than Republicans. The number of people who strongly disapprove of the president way outnumbered the people who strongly approved of the president. But that seems to be changing recently, and Republicans are breathing easier, and they

feel that the president's approval ratings have ticked up. The generic ballot advantage the Democrats had is no longer as big as it once was. They are feeling that Republicans are coming home and Republicans have a traditional advantage in midterm elections. Their base turns out because it's older, whiter, more rural, more married, more church going kind of people who turn out every two years instead of every four years. They think that they can pull this off, maybe keep the House or maybe at least limit their losses. And last thing to look forward to on that front, and I'm pretty sure we'll talk about it between now and then, in a couple of weeks, you have the California primaries. California primaries are interesting because it's everybody shows up and votes in the same primary Republican Democratic voter. You're all voting for the same candidates, the top two advance. Democrats are really worried that because they have so many

Democrats running, they could be shut out in some of the races in some of these key districts. So I think the place to watch for that is Orange County, typically longtime Republican hotbed that's been shifting over the years. But it's one of those places where Republican voters just did not seem to love Donald Trump. If Republican voters are energized enough to show up and vote in those primaries and even lock out Democrats in some of these races that otherwise would be battlegrounds, I think that says a lot about the environment. That would be huge. And that would be a huge example of political malpractice on the Democrat side. The fact that they couldn't winnow the herd, they couldn't call some of these candidates out and are in the position of

having too many Democrats so that the top two vote getters could be two Republicans. That, I can't even describe how horrific that would be in the blue state of California for Democrats to not have been able to manage the glut of candidates they had. I was out there a month or so ago covering that. Kelsey Snell is about to get on a plane and cover it again. So we will be talking about that in this podcast pretty soon. All right. That's all we have to say about this week's primaries. But we will be back in your feed tomorrow with our weekly roundup. In the meantime, you can catch our coverage on local public radio stations like WABE,

which got that shout out at the top of the show. If you like the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. That helps new listeners find us. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.